June 1, 2003. Évian-les-Bains, France.

The 29th G8 summit opened at the Hôtel Royal, overlooking Lake Geneva. The agenda: AIDS in Africa, Iraq reconstruction, WMDs, SARS, and whether the transatlantic relationship could survive the split over the invasion of Iraq. Jacques Chirac hosted George W. Bush for the first time since the rupture. Rare earths did not appear on the agenda. Neither did critical minerals. China was already producing more than 80% of global rare earths. Nobody in the room was paying attention.

The 52nd G7 leaders summit opens at the same hotel in three days: June 15, 2026.

This time, rare earths are the story. For the first time in the G7's history, securing critical mineral and rare earth supply chains is expected to produce a formal outcome document — a dedicated statement on supply chain resilience, separate from the leaders' communiqué France is likely to skip for the second straight year after the collapse of consensus at Kananaskis in 2025. French Foreign Trade Minister Nicolas Forissier said ahead of the summit: "I believe we will make very concrete progress on rare earths and critical minerals, securing our supply chains and ensuring we are not held hostage by certain countries."

The central institutional proposal is a permanent critical minerals secretariat — a body that would coordinate G7 stockpiling strategy, supply chain diversification, and production policy across the bloc's rotating annual presidencies. Five sources familiar with the discussions told Reuters the secretariat could be housed at the IEA or OECD, both based in Paris. The IEA is already working on plans to align stockpiling and production across member states.

There are fractures. European governments have pushed back against US leadership of the secretariat. Several expressed concern that Washington could restrict mineral access to allies during a future geopolitical emergency — the same argument China uses to justify its own export licensing. Italy, France, and Germany are building a parallel EU pilot stockpile independent of the G7 framework. The EU has shortlisted rare earths, tungsten, magnesium, and gallium for inclusion in that pilot.

What the summit is unlikely to produce is a binding agreement. What it may produce is the institutional architecture — a secretariat, a stockpile framework, a set of coordinated price floor commitments — that gives allied rare earth policy the durability that individual national programs cannot guarantee. Twenty-three years after the G7 gathered in Évian without even using the words, the question is no longer whether rare earths belong on the agenda. It is whether seven governments can agree on what to do about them.

The European Union announced in December 2025 that it would launch a pilot stockpile of critical raw materials by early 2026. In May, sources told Bloomberg the shortlist includes rare earths, tungsten, magnesium, and gallium. Ten EU countries are participating; Italy, France, and Germany are leading working groups. The European Commission has not disclosed quantities, financing, or release conditions. The EU's Critical Raw Materials Act sets a 2030 target of 40% of annual demand through EU processing — but the European Court of Auditors found that several materials already breach the 65% single-country threshold. The pilot stockpile is one of the few tools available before long-term capacity comes online. The governance questions — who owns it, who accesses it, who decides to release it — remain unanswered going into Évian.

USA Rare Earth's $2.83 billion acquisition of Serra Verde Group — operator of Brazil's Pela Ema mine, the only producing rare earth mine outside Asia supplying all four magnetic rare earths at scale — is targeting a Q3 2026 close. PricewaterhouseCoopers Brazil filed its auditor consent in a June 5 SEC filing, a key procedural step in the Brazilian and US regulatory approval process. Serra Verde's Pela Ema mine is already in commercial production, supplying neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium, and terbium. Upon close, USAR would become the only fully integrated mine-to-magnet rare earth platform outside China, operating across Oklahoma, South Carolina, West Texas, Ellesmere Port in the UK, Lacq in France, and Goiás in Brazil.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies published a one-year assessment of China's April 2025 rare earth export controls on May 5, 2026. Its headline finding: "New magnet manufacturing capacity coming online in the summer of 2026 will begin to reduce reliance on China, but self-sufficiency remains a long road." The report identified Australia as the most important US partner in countering Chinese dominance — hosting 89 active rare earth projects versus 12 in the US — and noted that market concentration has not improved. China's processing share remains above 90%. CSIS analysts concluded that even if China continues to extend the November 2026 truce, "a supply chain that is single-source dependent on Chinese rare earths remains structurally exposed" regardless of diplomatic outcomes.

Nicolas Forissier, French Foreign Trade Minister, ahead of the G7 Évian Summit
June 2026

CERIUM

Cerium makes up roughly 50% of Mountain Pass's rare earth ore by weight — the single largest rare earth fraction, exceeding even neodymium. Cerium goes into glass polishing powder, automotive catalytic converters, and UV-filtering glass — not permanent magnets. When rare earth projects publish economics, the NdPr price drives most of the analysis; cerium and lanthanum revenue is often assumed away. China processes roughly 90% of the world's cerium and prices it close to zero for domestic buyers. No Western rare earth project produces only NdPr — the economics require a home for every element in the ore. Cerium is where the feedstock math either holds or breaks.

China Northern Rare Earth Group High-Tech Co — the listed entity of China Northern Rare Earth Group, the world's largest rare earth company by market value — announced that it expects Q1 2026 net profit to more than double year-on-year. The result reflects elevated rare earth prices driven by China's own export controls. The strategic paradox: China's licensing restrictions raised prices globally, but the state-owned companies that hold Chinese mining quotas benefit directly from that price appreciation. The companies enforcing the controls are the same companies profiting from them.

— Global Times

The IEA's 2026 Ministerial noted that the average market share of the top three refining nations for copper, lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite, and rare earth elements rose to 86% in 2024 from 82% in 2020 — with almost all supply growth concentrated in a single dominant producer. For rare earths, that producer is China. For nickel, it is Indonesia. The data challenges the narrative that Western diversification efforts are working at the market level: on a global processing basis, concentration is increasing, not decreasing.

— International Energy Agency

At the February 2026 Critical Minerals Ministerial, the US seeded the Orion Critical Minerals Consortium with $600 million, which has since mobilized an additional $1.2 billion in non-US government funding — bringing the total to $1.8 billion for critical minerals investments worldwide. The consortium complements bilateral agreements: EXIM's $565 million for heavy and light rare earth extraction in Brazil alone, plus the $10 billion Project Vault strategic reserve program. Orion is specifically designed as a multilateral instrument, with G7-allied governments co-investing across a shared portfolio rather than running parallel national programs.

— US Department of State

G7 members are planning to produce area-specific outcome documents at Évian rather than a single joint communiqué — the second consecutive summit without one, after Kananaskis 2025 failed to build consensus under the Trump administration. The summit will produce separate statements on global economic imbalances, critical mineral supply chains, and development finance. French officials framed this as demonstrating "unity" on specific issues rather than a comprehensive declaration. For rare earth watchers, the critical minerals outcome document — not the communiqué — is the one that matters.

— Nippon.com / Reuters